Month: November 2018

Everyone thinks their system is reliable until suddenly it isn’t. With a service oriented or microservice based architecture, it can be easy to overlook a single point of failure that can cause a massive cascading failure, quickie harming users and losing their trust. Ensuring that a single failure is handled gracefully is of paramount importance in a large scale distributed system, but that’s much easier said than done. I’ve worked for multiple companies building large […]

A few years ago, it felt amazing that I had figured out to get an unlocked cell phone and pick up a SIM card in Germany to have service and data there. Picking up a card from a vending machine in the center of Heidelberg, I was able to get data on my phone while traveling the country after only an hour or so of figuring out the setup instructions and settings on my phone. […]

Traveling with kids can be a new and challenging experience for parents, especially those used to traveling alone before. It’s certainly not easy and requires a ton of planning and advance work. However, traveling as a parent without kids can be quite a change too. After two years of months of preparation before trips with our boys, our trip to Stockholm and Berlin was quite different. Here’s how it varied. 1. Our days ended much […]

With less than a month left until this year’s re:Invent, I wanted to share what I’ve learned about getting ready and making the most of it. This will be my third AWS re:Invent, and the first time I’m speaking. This year’s re:Invent is bigger than ever, and it could already be an overwhelming experience. With a full five days of workshops, sessions, talks, and events to explore, it’s best to prepare ahead of time. These […]